Thursday, July 20, 2006

Your Daily Insanity

During the past week's heat wave--it hit 100 degrees in New York City Monday--I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world's greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not?

OH MY GOD. I might just shoot myself. I can understand - though not forgive - Noonan for not knowing about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was and is exactly what she describes. After all, it was a UN-sponsored body, and we know what the Bush League thinks about the UN.

What I can't understand is that Noonan obviously doesn't know that the National Academy of Sciences - some, though not all of the world's best scientists - was ordered to look at climate change and came out with even less ambivalent findings than the IPCC. Who ordered the NAS to do so? George W. Bush.

If global warming is real, and if it is new, and if it is caused not by nature and her cycles but man and his rapacity, and if it in fact endangers mankind, scientists will probably one day blame The People for doing nothing.

But I think The People will have a greater claim to blame the scientists, for refusing to be honest, for operating in cliques and holding to ideologies. For failing to be trustworthy.

I... what... huh?

The scientists, who - despite early (and legitimate) skepticism that ended by the late 1980s - have been unanimous in their declarations that global warming is real, dangerous, and we're responsible. But because Noonan and her type have had their fingers in their ears for the last 20 years, somehow it's the fault of the scientists. For not yelling over them, or something.